The disclosure of the present application relates to registries, and more particularly to a professional development registry system.
Keeping track of today's numerous professional development requirements has become quite complex. Depending on an individual's particular professional field, he or she may be required to meet certain personal or general criteria, to participate in a number of continuing education courses in a given time period, and to attend a number of training courses to train the individual in a new or changing facet of the specific profession. Types of personal or general criteria that may be applicable to a particular profession or position include factors such as age and the absence of or limited offenses in criminal or traffic matters, for example.
Professional development requirements exist in several professions. For example, licensed attorneys are required to take a specific number of continuing legal education (CLE) courses to meet their annual or then-current period requirements to maintain their legal registrations. The CLE courses may cover one or more substantive aspects of the law, or may cover more general aspects of the legal profession, i.e. legal ethics and client trust fund management, or be required based on the years of experience of attorneys. As another example, licensed child care providers may be required to receive a certain amount of certified training throughout their career.
Teaching professionals are also often required to attend specific professional development training seminars in a given time period. Such training events are generally required to assist the professionals with current developments in his or her field, and to refresh the professional regarding what he or she may have learned in the past but does not commonly apply in their daily teaching duties.
Traditional systems used to keep track of professional development requirements are paper-based and rely heavily on manual data entry. Organizations maintaining such records typically have one or more staff members dedicated to data entry, and oftentimes the systems used require re-entry of the same data previously recorded on another paper document. In addition, traditional systems typically only allow for limited administrative access to data. An administrator would need to sort through several separate paper documents in order to obtain data pertinent to a particular inquiry, such as whether an individual is current in meeting his/her professional development requirements.
Other professional development registries than the manual systems referenced above may currently be utilized. For example, it is possible that a generic professional development registry may exist that consists of a simple database including, but not limited to, general identifying information for the professional and the overall level of education for developmental purposes.
A registration system may provide access to curriculum information. An example may be an online environment accessible by college students to review available educational courses and eventually register for such courses once a registration window opens for the students. Individuals intending to meet their requirements may access such curriculum information, including, but not limited to, the subject matter of a particular training course and the time(s) and date(s) for which the training course is available. However, such systems for the identification of one or more professional development courses are not connected to or integrated with systems for identifying the requirements necessary for a professional to meet his or her future development requirements.
In addition to the foregoing, a separate system may be utilized to store information relating to upcoming training events and seminars, and notices may periodically be sent to participants of the system to remind them of events to occur in the near future. Yet another system may be utilized to maintain training event attendance records. Such information may be made available by sign-in sheets at a training event or attendance sheets completed by attendees of a training event. That attendance information may then be entered into a database by a staff member so that an administrator may be able to determine which training events were attended by a particular participant.
Management of such training events is typically handled either outside of the aforementioned systems or somehow tied to a system providing access to curriculum information. Administrators for such events are required to plan training seminars, identify available dates, times, and locations for such seminars, identify seminar instructors/facilitators, prepare course materials, and manage the seminars themselves. Some of these tasks may be automated, but typically the tasks outside of “posting” an available seminar on a system to be accessed by individuals seeking seminars are managed outside of such a system.
Individuals may also seek scholarship assistance to attend training seminars. A traditional scholarship request typically includes several paper-based steps. The first step is the completion of paper-based documentation by the requester to make such a request. That documentation is then submitted to a receiving office for scholarship requests, which is then reviewed and entered into some sort of larger paper or electronic database. The requester may also then obtain some form of receipt from the receiving office to let the requester know that the scholarship request was received. If any information was missing from the request, the requester may receive a letter from the receiving office notifying the requester of such missing information and requesting that the information be provided as soon as possible. The requester may then provide the missing information and wait a certain period (typically several weeks to several months) until the requester is informed regarding whether or not the scholarship request was approved. As can be understood, such a system is slow, inefficient, and time consuming to utilize.
Recent systems have utilized simple databases to manage individual aspects of professional development. The aforementioned systems that may relate to professional development requirements typically stand alone from one another, without any interrelationships between the identification and recordation of professional development data, personal and/or general criteria, the availability of training seminars, the recordation of seminar attendance, the processing of scholarship requests, and the overall management of training events by trainers. It is therefore desired to develop a comprehensive professional development registry system to manage each of these tasks.